Abstract:
The cotton industry is a major player in Australia’s agricultural sector. It produces around 3% of the global cotton crop, delivers an average $2 billion per year in export earnings, and employs up to 10,000 workers across numerous regions. The industry comprises over 2,500 individual farms that cover over 45,000 km2 of farmland, mainly in inland NSW and Queensland with smaller areas in Victoria and Western Australia.
The cotton industry is reliant on a significant stock of natural capital that includes soil, water and biodiversity assets of the major riverine floodplains. While past management practices within the industry have depleted natural capital stocks over the past 50 years, emerging initiatives such as ‘myBMP’ seek to place the industry on a sustainable footing through improvement of on-farm practices that include better irrigation, use of chemicals, and management of native vegetation. These initiatives are being driven by a growing awareness that protection and restoration of natural ecological processes and ecosystem complexity in agricultural landscapes are important factors in the control of agricultural pests, maintenance of healthy rural landscapes, and improvement of farm profits.
Improving knowledge about natural systems in the cotton landscape will provide industry with a better evidence-base from which to set objectives and prioritise actions for natural capital enhancement via wholeof- industry management. This report presents a snapshot of key biodiversity assets across the cotton growing regions of NSW and Queensland, and uses these data to identify places in the landscape that would benefit from efforts to protect existing ecological systems or reconstruct/restore former native vegetation.
To understand an important component of natural capital in cotton growing regions, key biodiversity data were compiled across the combined extent of all cotton properties (45,070 km2) as well as the ‘cotton landscape’ (136,117 km2) which includes all cotton properties plus a 5 km buffer.
